How to Become an E-Mail Extrovert

View Comments

• Karissa, there are probably very few people who absolutely cannot switch back and forth between formal and informal writing -- I think it's sad that middle schools don't do a better job taking the language skills that these kids are developing and figuring out how to make them useful teaching opportunities.

  Will... great observations! I read somewhere that 80% of the communication happening in English langauge is generated electronically. Of course, if that were really true it would probably mean that 79.9% of what English speakers talk about is Spam. But I digress.

• I'm going to have to disagree with the sentiment at the end of this post. I think older people (like myself really) are just really used to all writing being formal. Thus when they see writing that's intended to communicate feeling informally, they react adversively, much like they would react if their boss told them "Yo homes, get your ass into work!"
  The "all writing is formal" attitude restricts writing to formal topics. Have you ever tried to express emotional sentiment in an email? Have you had things you said in an email grossly misinterpreted by the receiving party because they read what you wrote with a different attitude than you intended? Do you, like I do, refuse to email about almost any emotional topic over fear of being misinterpreted? (actually talking to the person works much better, and even that is sometimes misinterpreted)
  Writing has historically been a time consuming process compared to the other means of communicating. So it hasn't been used that much for emotional communication. I know, I know - haven't I read shakespeare? Poetry? They express emotion in the language right? But look! They changed the language! Shakespeare didn't write "He went to the market" he wrote "He has goneth due north to thy market!" And that is exactly what's happening with modern language. As email and instant messenging make emotional person-to-person communication through writing a preferred way to communicate directly with other human beings, writing gets adapted for what it's being used for - quickly communicating emotional messages. Extra characters and punctuation are added to written communication to fill in the gap of information that is usually expressed through tone or body lanuage! The language isn't degrading, it's expanding to allow emotion to be communicated through it as easily as technical concepts.
  (Shoot, if I was taking an english class, I could write an entire essay on this... ;-) )

• Dr. Jerz, I can't seem to post a comment on the identical topic that you posted on the NMJ site... I'm not sure why. A box pops up, but there are no boxes for typing a reply.
  Anyway, I was, like, going to say that ur new way of typing is so totally awesome!!!! Like, OMG, you sound so X-cited about bein' on the computer and like, wow... I get so annoyed when ppl type to me like thys that I can't even stand it.
  *ugh* The fact that I just typed that hidious response makes me want to start an advocacy program for seventh graders that really DO type like that... or just cringe in amazement that people like that do exist.

• Now if only we could set the e-mail personality chooser to "pirate".